PHR exposes the harms caused by prohibited weapons in war and crowd-control weapons used with excessive force in peacetime.

Despite international and national prohibition against chemical weapons,landmines, and other indiscriminate weapons in war time, government and armed groups around the world continue to use them with impunity. In Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere, thousands of defenseless men, women, and children are killed and maimed every year by these killers.

For more than three decades, PHR has investigated, documented, and spoken out about the health effects of prohibited weapons like chemical agents and landmines in war. We also shine a spotlight on the harms caused by so-called non-lethal weapons – tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons, and other crowd-control weapons – when they are deployed with excessive and often deadly force in protests and other civilian settings.

With our research, we advocate at the highest national and international levels to end the use and misuse of these weapons. For our work to rid the world of the scourge of landmines, PHR shared in the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.